The film will be screened at the Royal Opera House during the month-long festival of contemporary arts, which includes many free events.

The Indifferent Beak – inspired by W.B. Yeats’s poetic adaptation of Leda and the Swan – will have its world premiere as part of Sampling the Myth on 5 September. The film will also be broadcast live and free on giant screens in the Paul Hamlyn Hall alongside two other new film commissions from choreographers Kim Brandstrup and Robert Binet.

In the Leda and the Swan myth, the god Zeus seduces Leda by transforming himself into a swan. Royal Ballet dancers Claire Calvert and Eric Underwood will play the parts of Leda and Zeus in this new film adaptation of the tale.

‘[The dancers] have a really good chemistry’, says Charlotte. ‘I think it’s important to have that, especially with this story.’

‘If I am choreographing something on stage, I have this blank canvas, a box; and it’s easy to map out positions and structures’, says Charlotte about the process. ‘But with film, you’ve got to think about what the camera angle is going to be, where the location is going to be…It’s really made me grow as a choreographer.’

His latest programme includes the world premiere of All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, a piece he began working on during Draft Works last year. The title of the piece references Marshall Berman’s book of the same name, which explores modernism and its effect on community and culture.

‘I want to explore the pursuit of perfection in classical ballet, contrasted with the failure of that attempt to reach it,’ says Alex. ‘The third movement references The Sleeping Beauty’, says Alex. ‘For example, the first step in the third movement is from the famous Rose Adagio. However, each time the characters attempt a classical pose, they fail.

‘Similarly, I have chosen three archetypal balletic characters: a prince, a princess, and a jester. When they all perform together in the second movement, there is a sense of it being bit strange and awkward: the jester is the spanner in the works between the prince and princess.’

‘There is a powerful undercurrent of dramatic tension in this music and a kind of darkness that appeals to me,’ says Alex. ‘Even when I heard it for the first time, there was a clear character to each act - each has a very tangible sense.

‘The first movement, Sorrow Conquers Joy, is a solo for Marcelino. Marcelino’s character is a jester or a fool, but there is an underlying sadness to him; his solo has a crazy, hectic madness, interspersed with quiet, lamenting passages. In contrast, the third movement, a pas de deux with Eric and Melissa, is very tender and moving.’

The titular work of the programme, The Measure's Taken, is performed by the five dancers of Alex’s company and set to music by electronic sound artist Rutger Zuydervelt. A collaboration with visual artists Marshmallow Laser Feast, it had its world premiere at the EXIT festival in France this April.

The piece explores society’s relationship with technology and how it affects our interaction and self-image.

‘The dancers and visuals explore the intimate relationship we have with technology, and the link between technology and power,’ says Alex. ‘In particular, I allude to the idea of surveillance and the effect an objectifying system of power has in shaping our self-image.’

Particularly intriguing is Alex and Marshmallow Laser Feast's use of games-console technology to allow visual projections to relate to the movement on-stage.

‘We are using bespoke software similar to that used by games consoles to track the movements of the dancers and then inform the visuals. Essentially, we have eight Xbox Kinects around the stage that use infra-red light to pick up the shapes of the dancers. It has been a long-time in development due to practical and logistical considerations!’

Tetractys - The Art of Fugue runs until 15 February. Tickets are sold out though 67 day tickets will be released on the morning of each performance. Returns may also be available.
The production is staged with support from Outset and The Luxury Collection as well as generous philanthropic support from David Hancock, Linda and Philip Harley and two anonymous donors

Production of Raven Girl is made possible by generous philanthropic support from The Taylor Family Foundation, Mr and Mrs Brian Capstick, David Hancock, Linda and Philip Harley, an anonymous donor and The New Ballet Works Syndicate.

Raven Girl, a dark fairytale produced in collaboration between Wayne McGregor,author/visual artist Audrey Niffenegger (Time Traveler's Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry) and composer Gabriel Yared (The English Patient) premieres at the Royal Opera House later this month. The work is based upon Audrey's illustrated novella of the same name.

Before curtain up, Wayne and Audrey took part in an ROH Insights session featuring the ballet in rehearsal. Sarah Lamb and Eric Underwood worked with Wayne on a scene from Raven Girl. Following this, Wayne and Audrey spoke about their creative process and what it was like for Audrey to create a piece for the stage, as opposed to a novel or visual art work.

'I tried to make the characters a little more psychologically complex than you find in your average Grimm story,' said Audrey, 'I tried to make the characters bulletproof so the story could be pushed and pulled.'

Of Audrey's images for the book that has inspired the ballet, Wayne said: 'Audrey draws very physically. Her drawings have an implicit visual grammar and I found that extremely useful in translating those [illustrated] plates into dance'. As part of the session, Audrey explained the complex process of creating an aquatint, used by the artist and author to create the illustrations.

Wayne also spoke of the three stages intended for the Raven Girl project: a book which would have its own life, the stage version which would deviate in some ways from the book ('Some characters are absent. The bones of the story are there but we're telling it in a different way', noted Wayne), and a film version.

There's a lot that happens in the story. From a practical point of view, how is it that you tell the major story points? We want to make it like a piece of visual theatre; a series of visual images that stack up against each other. One of the things that Audrey spoke to me about early on was the anatomy of a fairytale; you don't have to do all the explanation.'

Generous philanthropic support has been provided for the production from The Taylor Family Foundation, Mr and Mrs Brian Capstick, David Hancock, Linda and Philip Harley, one anonymous donor and The New Ballet Works Syndicate.

It’s one of the best-loved scenes in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: the meeting of Alice and the hookah smoking Caterpillar. After his solo, backed by Arabian princesses, the caterpillar departs the stage with parasol in hand, followed by a trail of legs in perfect unison. 16 legs with 16 feet, all wearing the most beautiful, royal blue, crystal-encrusted pointe shoes. It’s a moment audiences love but behind it lies a huge amount of effort.

Each blue shoe belongs to one of eight dancers: either members of The Royal Ballet Company or Royal Ballet School students. Each individual pair is prepared by one of the two members of staff working in the Ballet Shoe Room. Máire first has to fit the shoes, before dying them an exact shade of royal blue. Blue ribbons are then attached before each shoe is hand-encrusted with crystals. It takes about a day to prepare each pair of shoes, and these are just eight of the thousands (approximately 6,000) pairs of pointes Máire has to make sure are available to the Company throughout the Season

Every Season we spend over £250,000 on ballet footwear, so every donation made to our annual Pointe Shoes Appeal makes a real difference. A pair of pointe shoes costs £39.

A new photography exhibition focusing on artists of The Royal Ballet runs this weekend (Friday 25 - Sunday 27 January) at The Hospital Club in Covent Garden.

The exhibition, entitled 'Now is all there is – Bodies in Motion', was created by renowned international photographer Rick Guest in collaboration with leading fashion stylist Olivia Pomp. Royal Ballet artists and creative team members depicted include Marianela Nuñez, Thiago Soares, Edward Watson, Zenaida Yanowsky and Wayne McGregor.

'The exhibition has evolved over the course of two to three years,' explained Rick, 'we’ve built up this fantastic collection of images, and when Kevin O’Hare saw it, he thought an exhibition would be a fitting way to mark his first season.'

The exhibition, which takes its name from a quote by choreographer George Balanchine, is described as a modern take on the classical world of ballet and a coming together of three separate disciplines: photography, dance and fashion.

'Balanchine’s plea of "now is all there is, get on with it, just do it now" is equally as important for dancers as it is for photography, which is a one-click moment,' continued Rick, 'likewise for contemporary fashion. In this exhibition, all these things come together.'

Stylist Olivia, who has worked with Rick on a wide range of international commissions, used evocative and unconventional fashion to capture the dancers’ abilities in a different light, away from the main stage.

'The whole idea was to take the dancers outside their comfort zone, which was why we shot them away from the opera house,' she explained. 'The costumes, whether wings, or a cape, or big skirts, give another element and become part of the body.”

The images highlight the physicality of ballet, capturing the dancers in fleeting moments of time to illustrate the balance and poise demanded by dance.

'We didn’t have choreographed sequences when we were shooting. We just asked the dancers to give us what they wanted. They weren’t performing to an audience of 2,300, they weren’t doing it on a sprung floor. They were dancing in a studio, on a hard floor, in front of four people. As such, they became portraits rather than being about choreography'

The exhibition is taking place at The Hospital Club, 24 Endell Street, London, WC2H 9HQ and is free to attend.
It will be open to the public on Friday 25 January 10am – 4pm, Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 January 10am – 6pm. All pieces are for sale and limited to six prints each. View and buy prints online.

Royal Ballet Soloists Melissa Hamilton and Eric Underwood were the subjects of a recent In Conversation event.

They spoke to fellow artist Gary Avis about their careers so far as well as plans for the future and what they're most excited about in the upcoming Season.

As well as recounting how she left the UK to train in Greece, Melissa spoke about debuting in Romeo and Juliet. On top of the challenge of the role itself, she had to change partners three days before opening night. "My debut was put together with my Romeo [Edward Watson] three days before...To do any MacMillan ballet you rely on your partner, that's what makes MacMillan MacMillan: it's about the relationship of the characters, but Ed was there for me 100%. When we did the balcony pas de deux in performance was the first time we had run it the whole way through!"

Both Eric and Melissa started ballet late and Eric told Gary about leaving his native Washington D.C. for the School of American Ballet in New York to train as a dancer: "Ballet was really clear for me - things were right and wrong. There was no grey area so it's easy to know what you're trying to achieve and I immediately fell in love with ballet. "